Integration of Timed Metadata in the HTTP Streaming Architecture

In the context of multimedia streaming over HTTP, HLS seems to be the most widely adopted solution for a wide range of applications. Its support spreads across a variety of devices and software products, making it the ideal choice for a service aimed at a large customer base. A diverse set of closed-source media servers are available for this use case, but unfortunately we can't say the same for open source alternatives. The most popular tool in this space, a module for the nginx server called nginx-rtmp, handles just the basic functionalities of the HLS protocol. The aim of this work has been to extend its capabilities with the support of real-time metadata. Such additional information, synchronized with the multimedia stream, can be used to improve the user experience with media related descriptions, e.g., the title and author of the current song, but also enable automated processing of the media stream, e.g. marking the beginning and end of the commercials. In particular, the added code allows to handle AMF metadata in an incoming RTMP stream and repackage them in a format suitable for the HLS stream, with the use of the ID3 tag standard. In the hope that open source projects will keep improving alongside proprietary solutions, all the contributions made to the module have been submitted to the original repository on Github.